Ada Aharoni

At 13, just after WW2, Aharoni together with an Arab student co-edited a school magazine, called Rainbow,[10][11] at Alvernia, with the motto: Abolish wars forever. British Peace Poet Wilfred Owen became an inspiration for her own work as a Peace Poet. He made her see "the absurdity of war."[12]

Aharoni began writing poetry on the theme of war and peace during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War (Yom Kippur War). "In most of Aharoni's first published poems on the theme of war and peace, her Egyptian origins linger discreetly in the background," Joel Beinin writes in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry,[13] in which he examines the diversity of Egyptian Jewish identities in Egypt and in the diaspora. "The Egyptian-Israeli negotiations and interim Sinai disengagement agreements following the 1973 war apparently encouraged her to advance beyond general calls for peace to articulate more specifically what peace meant to Aharoni through recollections of her previous life in Egypt."

Some of these early peace poems are concerned with the struggle for the survival of Israel, as seen in To an Egyptian Soldier (written during the Yom Kippur War), where Aharoni tells him that "you will always have your Nile... but if we lose there's only the sea." The source of this "passionate attachment to her new homeland" is her recollection of what it was to be "an 'outsider', unwanted and not belonging" in Egypt, Len Goldzweig (lecturer in the Dept. of English at Haifa University) writes in the Preface of Aharoni's Poems from Israel (1992).

She recalls this sense of alienation in Arab Israeli Student on T.V., where the student ponders on where he belongs: Do I feel like an Israeli Arab? Or like an Arab Israeli? "I remember my own rootless wound in Egypt land – and I hurt your dangling hurt, my Semitic cousin in pain."

Aharoni believes that poems are suitable vehicles for building bridges of trust and respect for each other's culture and humanity.[14] As we have become more mobile, the most profound difference between us is our culture, and not the territory. Peace poems have the ability to present the stories of both sides in a conflict, "in all its reality, pain, hope and yearning for peace."

Examples of this two-sided view are found in the poems This Cursed War and Remember Me Every Time the Moon Rises Over the Sphinx, inspired by letters found on fallen Israeli and Egyptian soldiers during the Yom Kippur War.

"The only way to bridge the cultural differences between human beings is through knowledge of each other,"[15] Aharoni told Birute Regine during an interview for Regine's book Iron Butterflies: Women Transforming Themselves and the World, in which Aharoni is one the Iron Butterflies. In her poem A Bridge of Peace, Aharoni extends a bridge to the women of Palestine: "My Arab sister, let us build a sturdy bridge from your olive world to mine, from my orange world to yours... we do not want to make each other afraid under our vines and under our fig trees."

Aharoni's latest poetry collection is Rare Flower (2012), a moving poetry collection about love and peace spanning five decades and dedicated to the memory of her departed husband Chaim Aharoni and her departed daughter Talia Aharoni Winkler. The book was translated into many languages, and nominated candidate to Nobel Prize, in 2014.

Several of Aharoni's poems are put to music and released on three CDs: A Green Week, To Haim – To Life (Love Poems) and Rare Flower.

In 2017 Aharoni published Horizon of Hope: (Gvanim Publishers, Tel Aviv, 2017): A Bilingual poetry collection: English-Hebrew, of love, peace, women poems, and poems based on letters of soldiers to their loved ones in Israel, during the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, as well as anti-terror on Daesh (ISIS).

In the Preface of Poems from Israel mentioned above, Goldzweig describes the language of Aharoni's poems as unpretentious. "She doesn't hide behind words," and this creates a "ruthless honesty." He also comments on her irregular use of rhyme and stanza form. "This too, is a form of nakedness, because so much bad poetry is hidden behind strong galloping rhythms and chiming rhymes."

Prof. Rebecca Oxford (Alabama A&M University), in her book The Language of Peace – Communicating to Create Harmony,[16] analyzes the use of the "image of peace as a cross-cultural bridge" in Aharoni's A Bridge of Peace. In this poem, Oxford writes, the "assonance and imagery" of the words "olive world" and "orange world" bring the two women, one Israeli and one Palestinian, together and show that they have much in common. A "bridge of Jasmine understanding" can banish the fear, allowing each woman to sit with her baby "under her vine and under her fig tree and none shall make them afraid!"

Aharoni herself, in an interview with the Sketchbook literary journal,[17] confirmed that she prefers open form poems as they give room for more depth and intimacy.

• From the Pyramids to Mount Carmel. Eked, Tel Aviv, 1979.
• Shin Shalom: New Poems (a bilingual edition, Hebrew and English). Eked, Tel Aviv, 1985.
• Metal et Violettes (poems in French). Caractères, Paris, 1987.
• Poems from Israel. Berger Press Publications, Haifa, 1992 (first edition 1972).
• In the Curve of My Palm. Yaron Golam, Tel Aviv, 1996.
• In My Carmel Woods. Micha Lachman, Haifa, 1999.
• You and I Can Change the World. Micha Lachman, Haifa, 2004.
• Women: Creating A World Beyond War and Violence (mixed poetry and prose). Micha Lachman, Haifa, 2005.
• The Pomegranate: Love and Peace Poems. 1st Library Books, Indiana, US, 2007.
• Rare Flower: Life, Love and Peace Poems (the Hebrew edition is called Perah Nadir). Dignity Press, Oregon, US, 2012.
• Harimon: Love and Peace Poems (Hebrew). Hadarim, Israel, 2014.
• Horizon of Hope:A Bilingual poetry collection: English-Hebrew. Gvanim Publishers, Israel, 2017.
• Kiruv Levavot - A Nearing of Hearts - Arabic edition published in Cairo, Egypt, 2018 , translated by Amr Zacharia with an introduction by Prof. M. Fawzi Daif.
• Iflac Anthology Anti-Terror and Peace 2016-17. Published on Amazon.
• Iflac Anthology Anti-War Peace 2018.

• The Second Exodus. Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 1983.
• To Alexandria, Jerusalem and Freedom. Pennsylvania, 1984. (Published also in a Hebrew edition 1985, and an Arabic edition 1986, Mahmoud Abassi, Shfaram, Galilee, Israel.)
• From the Nile to the Jordanpublished on Amazon Kindle and also as paperback. (Also available in French: Du Nil Au Jourdan). Micha Lachman, Haifa, 1999.
• Bringing Hearts Together: A Novel About the Jews from Egypt (in Hebrew only, titled: Kiruv Levavot). Gvanim, Tel Aviv, 2011.
• The Golden Age of the Jews from Egypt – Uprooting and Revival in Israel (in Hebrew and partly in French). Aharoni, A. ed. World Congress of the Jews from Egypt, 2013.

• Not in Vain: An Extraordinary Life. Ladybug Press, California, US, 1998.
• Thea Wolf – la femme en blanc de l'hôpital d'Alexandrie. Editions Le Manuscrit / Manuscrit.com, 2014.
• Second enlarged edition:Not in Vain: An Extraordinary Life. Amazon, 2017.

• Peace Flower: A Space Adventure. Yaron Golan, Tel Aviv and Micha Lachman, Haifa, 1995.
• Rare Flower, Dignity Press, Oregon, US, 2013.

• Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Aharoni, A. ed. and Cronin G., Goldman, L., Peter Lang, New York, 1992.
• Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow's Inner Voice (Hebrew). Pardes Publishing House, Haifa, 2007.
• More than 2017 articles publishedin Literary, Socioligical

Movie

The Pomegranate Of Reconciliation And Honor

http://syndicjournal.us/cover-syndic-no-14/film-pomegranate-of-reconciliation-and-honor-by-ada-aharoni/

Synopsis:

The film highlights the need for reaching Peace between Israelis and Palestinians, based On the author's authentic narrative of her own uprooting, and that of the Jews from Egypt/She quotes Elie Wiesel's question at his Nobel Prize Ceremony:"Who is the enemy?" The enemy Wiesel says "Is the whose story you don't know!" Ada Aharoni tells her Palestinian friend that he has succeeded to tell their story of their uprooting, where as the million Jews from Arab countries haven't succeeded yet. In this film she tells her Palestinian neighbor her story in the hope that by the end of it they will be friends and not enemies anymore. It's also the fascinating story of the "Second Exodus" of the Jews from Egypt, in the second half of the Twentieth Century.